Siha
by Kaira Sakamoto
Summary: I get some sleep, sometimes. A oneshot.


I get some sleep, sometimes - like any normal person does on any normal night. But most of the time I don't, and am plagued by dreams: dreams of beacons and warnings and the hiss of air leaving my tank; the reflection of the stars along the glass of my helmet and the heat of the Normandy's last heaving breaths all around me.

So, sometimes I sleep. Sometimes, it's even good.

There was always that one dream that never failed to put me to sleep; to bring me under the Sandman's grace in the sway of a cradle – easy and sweet and just a little exhilarating. It followed me throughout most of my life: from before I could talk to the day of the Normandy crash. Like an old friend.

It starts out with a sky full of stars and nighttime colors not native to my home of Mindoir. The taste of salt is in the air, and below me is a long stretch of water and waves. In my ears I hear gulls, and the wind is whipping through my hair, my body burning as if I were running full tilt across the plains of my home. I turn my head, laughing in a high, excited voice; and I see feathers at the corner of my eyes. The birds have taken to following me as I run, I think, until I look further down.

My feet are not there: just the blue of the water; and when I look further to my sides, my arms, flung out and swinging as I'd been running, are not arms at all, but wings. Gold feathers cover sinew and muscle and bone, almost silver as the moonlight hits them.

Thinking outside the dream, I know that I should be afraid; the body I'm in is not really my own, and it should be unfamiliar to me in ways that I still can't describe.

But I tilt that body down as if I've done so for years, and the feathers and tip of the wings skim the surface of the water and I am lost in my laughter and joy, fearless and breathless and so, so calm. As I fly, following the colors painting the waters to the now rising sun, I hear a name garbled by the winds. It makes my heart leap, because it is my name and it is all of me, unerringly accurate.

And then I wake. Sometimes it is to my name – the name not of the dream but outside of it; in that place of sleep and awareness, I usually find myself thinking that what they're saying is wrong: that's not my name, I've been told I say. And then, the thought comes clear before it disappears like smoke: _soon._

It'd never failed to calm me. That is, until I was brought back from the dead and met him.

Thane, with his tide-pool eyes and rumbling voice and patience; Thane, with his talk of peaceful afterlife and repentance and the Sea; Thane, the one whose presence I had grown to love and care for, had grown to need like the air vital to life. Him, with his people's legends and Gods.

That drell, calling me by a name that took my heart from my chest.

Siha.

When the dream changed, it was the very night he smiled and called me by that name.

Because when he did, the dream no longer became a comfort; instead it was filled with my flying on unsteady wings, back-dropped by a sky burning red and filled with fire and ash and screaming. The sea below me – because now it is not just water but the Sea, the path to my home, the domain of my Mistress' Sister-God – is wreathed in hard oranges and crimsons, and along its shores are the colors of a people who most believe in us. They are screaming as they burn, pleading as a fire traps them between drowning and being eaten by the flames.

The once calming dreams are no more, and his name for me gives me an uneasy feeling despite his initial intentions; for the name on the winds called me Siha; and the people who pleaded for me called me the same. More often than not it feels as if I were an angel that had failed long ago.

There are times that I wake beside him, choking on the memory of ashes and fear and the chorus of that name, refusing to speak for fear that my voice is as hoarse as theirs had become by the end. He's learned, in the scant few weeks of spending these nights with me, that it is better not to talk. Instead, he gathers me in his arms, letting me remember where I am as I take in his scent of desert heat, spices and rain.

_Because when you wake up, Siha,_ he'd explained once, _it seemed as though you were lost as only my people can be._

_Lost_, I'd said, recalling the dream, the people that burned away as I flew toward the sun. _Lost seems about right._


End file.
